In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. — Jacques Barzun

Archive for the ‘Europe’ Category

When my daughter started talking about maybe going to see Adele when she appears in Austin TX, I had to admit I did not know who Adele is. So I researched a bit, Google of course, and found out Adele was shocked at her tax rate. This was due to her multi-platinum selling recording “19”. What’s worse, her next, “21” is out selling the first.

Adele recently told Q magazine, “I’m mortified to have to pay 50 percent!,” she said.”[While] I use the NHS, I can’t use the public transport anymore. Trains are always late, most state schools are s–t, and I’ve gotta give you, like, four million quid. Are you having a laugh?”

Sounds like she needs to learn a new tune, and the Kinks “Sunny Afternoon” may be just the one for her.

That’s how Jon Randal describes the bloggers who exposed the “death” of Muhammad al-Dura as a sham. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet asks how Charles Enderlin and French 2 TV perpetrated a fraud, and finds a culture of unaccountability and closing ranks that has little interest in the truth.

Fjordman points out a paradox in multicultural orthodoxy: Indigenous peoples’ resistance to the arrival of people from other parts of the world, with other cultures, was noble in the past, but it’s racist today. The Sioux were justified in trying to defend their homeland—but the Danes and Serbs aren’t.

My rule of thumb, on wars, is to fight them with your enemies, when absolutely necessary; but never with your friends, and in particular, never in order to create new enemies.

It is worth thinking carefully about the Clinton-Bush policy in the Balkans, which so far has led to the alienation of Russia, the creation of Islamic states in Europe, and the encouragement of separatist movements everywhere. The ideology seems to be that, if a territory is dominated by a certain ethnic or religious group different from that of the majority in the nation of which it is a part, it deserves self-determination, and may become an independent state. This has implications not only for the Palestinians, the Basques, and the Chechens, but also for Muslim separatist movements in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Kashmir, as well as for Kurdish rebels in Turkey, many tribal groups in Africa, and so on. Indeed, how can we simultaneously strive to keep Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites in the same state in Iraq and insist on Kosovo’s right to independence?

At issue is nothing less than the survival of the nation-state as a unit of political organization. If Kosovo, Kashmir, Kurdistan, etc., have a right to independence, what about New Mexico? Paris’s banlieus? New York’s Little Italy? San Francisco’s Chinatown? Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill?

The point isn’t that such independence movements are likely or politically viable. It’s rather that validating the underlying principle would turn immigration and self-segregation into powerful political weapons. You want some of your neighbor’s territory? Just send in the immigrants, make sure they don’t assimilate, let them achieve critical mass, and then have them insist on self-determination. This is already happening in many countries in Europe. There are activists who want to see what is happening in the American southwest similarly.

Once immigration is perceived as a slow-motion invasion, war by other means, the only rational thing to do is to restrict it radically and to create institutions to guarantee that immigrants integrate and assimilate. The latter is probably a good idea in any case—at least to the point of encouragement, if not insistence—though it flies in the face of multiculturalist dogma. The former would be unfortunate, I think, but seems inevitable if nations want to remain intact—and if they haven’t already ceded control to organizations such as the European Union that have their own reasons for wishing to undermine the political authority of the nation-state.

It’s illegal to homeschool children in Germany. Parents who attempt it risk having their assets seized and their children taken away and placed in foster care. Hitler sponsored this law in 1938 to see to it that no one could escape Nazi indoctrination. Now, German and EU bureaucrats defend it to see to it that no one can escape their indoctrination.

In the two-and-a-half months of war in 1999, Serbian authorities did terrible things to Kosovar Albanians. The war precipitated the very crisis that the West imagined, but had not actually come to pass: the “ethnic cleansing,” via mass expulsions, of Kosovo of its Muslims. But in the nine years since, Kosovar Albanians have done terrible things to their Serb neighbors — and it is no exaggeration to state that a Serb in post-1999 Kosovo is worse off than an Albanian in pre-1999 Kosovo. To our shame, this situation is a direct result of our intervention — and has evolved under our watch.

The KLA and its associates in Kosovar politics, in radicalizing the situation to provoke the 1999 war, thereby made it impossible to return to a situation of peaceful coexistence. Whereas the intervening West envisioned — if they envisioned anything at all — a tolerant, multiethnic Kosovo along the lines of what was sought on Bosnia, Kosovar Albanians envisioned their own ethnic cleansing, of Serbs from Kosovo. What the NATO allies waded into was not a rescue of a wronged party as such, but a party determined to wreak precisely the evils upon its foe that its foe perpetrated upon it. Under NATO occupation and UN administration, this goal is met with appalling thoroughness.

The EU’s Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini states that Europe must relax its immigration controls and open the door to an extra 20 million “Africans and Asians” during the next two decades. Most of these “Africans and Asians” come from the predominantly Muslim countries of North Africa and the Greater Middle East.

A crowd of 16,000 expatriate Turks cheered Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a vast indoor auditorium in Germany on Sunday as he told them to resist assimilation into the West.

The political rally by Germany’s biggest ethnic minority upset German politicians, who objected to a major public event on German soil being advertised on posters in Turkish only.

Erdogan indirectly addressed those concerns, saying it was right for Turkish immigrants to learn German and other languages so they could integrate, but wrong to abandon their Turkish heritage and assimilate.